After a successful test, I am pleased to announce that I will soon be converting the board to phpBB and moving it to my server*. In addition to resolving some of the problematic quirks that ZetaBoards has, the move to my server will make the boards ad-free!

I plan to perform the conversion this Friday evening, 11/20, starting around 10 pm. At this time, the board will be made read-only -- you can read everything but you will not be able to make any new posts.

I expect it to only take a couple of hours to perform the conversion, to adjust the settings of the new board, and to get the moquizbowl.com domain pointed to the new server. The board should be fully functional at its new home early Saturday morning. In the event that the conversion is unsuccessful, I will just re-enable this board and try the conversion later.

I will make an announcement that outlines any action you may need to take following the conversion, but here is what I know right now:
* The conversion tool will generate new temporary passwords for everyone. You will need to return to this installation (which will still be accessible at the old ZetaBoards URL) and check your Inbox for your password. Once you log in with the temporary password, remember to change it.
* Unfortunately, the conversion tool does not copy signatures. Considering the mandatory identification policy, I expect that I will copy signatures over manually for everyone, but be forewarned that you may be required to set your signature on the new board.
* The conversion does not copy avatars either. I will not be transferring these myself.

I hope that this conversion will be of minimum disruption to everyone and a welcome improvement for the boards.

*My new Linux virtual private server; not the cheapo-deluxe GoDaddy shared hosting account that is down right now.

Everyone's passwords have been replaced with autogenerated passwords! You will need to log back into the old ZetaBoards installation (http://s4.zetaboards.com/Academic_Competition) and check your inbox for your new password. Once you retrieve it and log in here, be sure to change it! (Note: I had some problems with the script so let me know if you didn't get a PM with your password)

I will be copying signatures over from the old board shortly for those who had signatures. If you do not have a signature, please add one with your name (first name is sufficient) and affiliation to comply with our identification policy.

A reminder that avatars are among some of the settings that didn't make it over.

Coaches, I will restore your access to the coaches forum in the next day or two.

I'll be tweaking some board settings in the coming days, but if you notice any issues with the new installation or have any suggestions for improvement, please reply in this thread and I'll try to address them.

While phpBB3 does have an option to attach a signature by default, it's disabled by default and for whatever reason phpBB3 doesn't have a configurable option to make it enabled for everyone by default. Fortunately, thanks to the highly customizable nature of phpBB3, I was able to get around this by hard-coding the "attach a signature" post option to true.

Update:
Signatures should now be copied. I only copied signatures that included identifying information but I preserved everything in those signatures. There were a couple of BBCode discrepancies I had to work out to keep them as similar as possible. It also looks like any custom BBCode I add to resolve these issues doesn't retroactively apply to posts already in the database so posts with different font faces or font sizes, centered text, or the [HR] tag may not display properly. For some stupid reason the phpBB admin control panel is requiring both an opening and closing tag so it won't let me add the [HR] tag... I'll figure out a mod to resolve this.

Major bug I noticed during this process: ZetaBoards apparently has a bug where the alphabetical member list shown by clicking on the "Members" link at the top of the page does NOT provide a link to the last page (there are 8 pages but it only goes through 7). As a result, the crawler did not find the last page and the following users were not copied:
WOW is so much cooler than ACO
Wunderlich
wustlpk2010
YA RLY
yellid23 -- resolved
Zethamphetamine
ZhangC1459 -- resolved

All post content was copied but they are not registered users at this time. I will definitely work to restore yellid23 and ZhangC1459 as they have been active recently, but the others are either gimmick accounts or haven't been active in years so they aren't as high a priority.

[quote="U. Lou Sthagaim"]
All post content was copied but they are not registered users at this time. I will definitely work to restore yellid23 and ZhangC1459 as they have been active recently, but the others are either gimmick accounts or haven't been active in years so they aren't as high a priority.[/quote]

wustlpk2010 is actually Puneet from our team, so if you could restore his information, that would be great--I know he probably won't be posting very much on here, but it's an actual legitimate account.

Actually, I really appreciate this because it exposed a permission setting I missed... guests shouldn't be allowed to post anywhere. This should be resolved now.

This is one thing that ZetaBoards got right... permissions are set in an intuitive grid. On phpBB I apparently have to go to each group on each board individually to set permissions (though I can easily copy permissions between forums), thus the oversight.

Another potentially annoying default setting you might want to change:

Board Preferences->Edit posting defaultsNotify me upon replies by default: -- this appears to default to true, so with this setting you'll get a bunch of emails if people reply in a thread you posted to.

I noticed this issue too. This redirect should be in place now. Most other old ZetaBoards links should come up as not found and run through my 404 handler; not sure why that one didn't work the same way.

The links have been re-added to the top-right corner of the default board style. Those who switched to use a different board style won't see these (yet). Please let me know if there are any issues with this showing up properly in your browser.

Charbroil wrote:Are they supposed to be lined up in a column? I see all of them, but they're all stacked up so that it's kind of distracting.

You can see all of them and they're all showing up without having to mouse over everything? I've seen that too, and I believe it's just because the stylesheet defining how the board looks is cached on your computer. Refreshing a page should reload the stylesheet from the server (at least, it did for me). It should show up the same as it was on ZetaBoards (mouse over "More" to get a menu of links)